What do we want from art? It’s a question that might feel like Philosophy 101, but in an era when large language models are as likely as humans are to make stories and images, it’s far from basic. Enter Dave Eggers’s latest novel, Contrapposto. Weaving together an account of a complicated relationship between an artist and a curator-gallerist that lasts 65 years and a globe-spanning tour of art- and living-making in the postmodern era, Contrapposto deploys that most traditional of narrative art forms, realist fiction, to consider what it means to make art in a society that has detached value from creative skill. There is no talk of AI here (thank goodness), but if you are someone who cares about the human part of the humanities, it’s hard not to draw an emphatic line from Contrapposto’s preoccupations to those of our moment.
Eggers’s novel is curious about art-making of many kinds, but its sympathies are with the craftspeople. These are the “draftsmen,” as the aptly named art professor Carpenter deems them, holders of “God-given talent in what has been, for two thousand or so years, considered the artist’s trade,” but who have become anachronisms in an era of art that prefers concepts to embodied talent. All the worse for Cricket, Contrapposto’s painter protagonist, who can’t help but love his craft even after he learns it’s no longer in fashion. Better to be a wage earner and make the work you want than to suppress your skill for the sake of a trend. Cricket shares his pragmatic idealism with other Eggers heroes in works such as Zeitoun and You Shall Know Our Velocity, exhibiting the dogged bravery that comes from trying to make your way in a world that doesn’t understand you.
For Cricket, as with so many artists, art is less a vocation than an existential necessity. When Contrapposto opens, Cricket is Robert, only child of a loving but overwhelmed single mom in Indiana with awful taste in men. The nickname is what his grandfather calls him, and drawing is what they do together in the old man’s basement room—respite from a volatile boyfriend’s chaos. Art only becomes a vehicle for something more when Cricket gets recruited by a pair of local teens to vandalize a newly built jungle gym. The brains of this operation is Pia—short for Olympia, later Limpy, Lim, and sometimes Camus, her ever-changing appellation both shorthand for her knack for self-reinvention and counterpoint to Cricket’s steadfast Cricket-ness. At Olympia’s direction, Cricket renders a series of ribald rhymes in absurdly baroque lettering on the playground’s fresh wood—the incongruous combination of content and form showing him, for the first time, “the essence of art,” the presence of meaning beyond meaning, rendered by one mind in search of others who can appreciate it.
Olympia—older, worldlier, ballsier—becomes Cricket’s conduit from the world of art to the Art World, introducing him to its philosophies, communities, languages, and dubious systems of value. He remains on its periphery, but Olympia gives him both access and means to assess what he sees. Through her, Cricket witnesses a nightmarish art school crit in which groupthink masquerades as taste. Years later, she secures him a job in the fabrication shop of a former peer from that crit, now an art luminary who employs the kind of artists their teachers mocked to make work that bears only his name. Again and again, Cricket sees the marketable novelty of hollow “idea” art push aside true talent. He keeps an open mind, but he’s skeptical of Olympia’s insistence that the wealthy investors and scene-y galleries that like this kind of work are the dirty fuel that keeps the good art getting made.
But often in Contrapposto, you can also sense Eggers’s effort to give conceptual art a fair shake. In adolescence and college, Cricket’s friend and foil is Jed—another quietly brilliant Indiana boy who lets art find him, though his is an art that comes from living itself. “I know it sounds strange,” he tells an incredulous Cricket, “but I feel like an artist when I’m loving someone. When I’m in that moment, reacting and pleasing and shaping, that’s my art. It activates all the same parts of my brain and body that art does, or is supposed to.” Even the art luminary with a staff of dozens produces work Cricket genuinely admires. “The dilettante he’d known in college had grown into a person capable of making monumental things,” Cricket marvels. “Or not making great things.… By paying and managing a team of talented artisans, he brought forth the existence of great things.” Ideas in art do matter—a point Carpenter, who becomes Cricket’s mentor, likes to make; he is quick to note, however, that “explaining” them is not the same as “realizing” them.
Still, perhaps because the novel hews close to the outsider Cricket’s perspective, it’s hard not to feel as though Contrapposto would prefer a world where the artisans, rather than their managers (a damning epithet itself), were still the stars. Nowhere is this ambivalence more palpable than in Eggers’s rendering of Olympia—a woman of ideas who lives to shepherd their realization, but who seems, unlike Cricket, willing to compromise artistic honor for fame and money. Cricket worships her because she creates, through sheer force of will, a small universe in which art’s primacy can be taken for granted. As for what she gets from Cricket—well, it’s certainly flattering to be worshipped. As their lives and careers progress, it’s clear that Cricket appeals to her for his integrity—his belief in the honesty of art done well and the beauty of a real idea that takes visual form.
Contrapposto is fundamentally a love story, and, as in the graceful asymmetry of its titular technique, there is loveliness in the union of two complementary opposites. Yet I couldn’t help but want a more radical alternative than the retreat to tradition that the novel offers as an antidote to late-capitalist art. It’s one that Contrapposto itself hints at in a collective Olympia imagines back in Indiana—her, Jed, and Cricket its founding members, together making sharp, weird, beautiful, strange, realistic, abstract refractions of the world, true to themselves and their beliefs and their curiosity about what art can do and be. One answer to what we want from art is connection. Another is the promise of a truly new way of seeing the world. Maybe a future for art, and for its Crickets and Olympias, lies in embracing both.•
